‘Your reputation precedes you. There can be only one item in this sale that would attract an individual such as yourself. Would you like to see it?’

He led me to a side chapel. The lowday sun fell pale through the bars of the tall windows. The object stood on a pedestal, protected by light screens. It was a vitreous plate milled in plastek, about a third of a metre square.

‘Magnificent, isn’t it, sir?’ Medonae’s mouth said.

It was the most appalling thing I had ever seen.

‘Exquisite.’

‘I’ll leave you to enjoy it,’ he said.

I wasn’t alone in the room. Several other visitors were viewing the piece. One was a hard-set man with extensive augmetic optics sutured into his skull.

‘Quite a thing,’ he mused.

‘Indeed,’ I replied.

‘Genuine,’ he added. His optics whirred. ‘I can gauge the age of the glass, the plastek sheath. The format of the plate matches the kind she was known to use. A miracle beyond measure that something so fragile could have survived so long, when so much else perished.’

‘Truly,’ I agreed.

‘But even more,’ he went on, ‘the image itself. The composition. She had an extraordinary eye as a remembrancer. I doubt any soul in the Imperium has ever matched her skill at the capture of picts.’

‘This they say of her,’ I said. ‘An exceptional gift. Which is why she was chosen, of course, for the expedition.’

‘To think,’ he sighed, ‘that someone had that kind of superlative talent, beyond any before or since, and yet that is still not the thing she is most famous for.’

He looked at me. His optics clicked and buzzed.

‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Do you think the most incredible thing about it is that it is an original pict, made ten thousand years ago, by the hallowed founder of the Imperial Truth? Or that it is a pict of Horus Lupercal?’

‘I think the most incredible thing about it,’ I replied, ‘is that it is sitting on sale here and not sequestered in a vault on far-off Terra.’

Euphrati Keeler was a remembrancer. In the last years of the Great Crusade, armed with a good eye and a picter, she had been appointed to the 63rd Expeditionary Force, to observe and record the operation of the Luna Wolves. Her work was remarkable. Her fame spread. The Warmaster himself regarded her with favour. In that distant age, the God-Emperor had decreed that the operation of the Imperium should be documented by artists and historians to make a chronicle of the foundation of the Age of Man. Such had been the mindset then: that the great work of engineering a civilisation should be honestly, freely and independently recorded.

That does not sound like the Emperor I know.